


Family History

by kitsunerei88



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Math is hard, Young Amita
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 04:55:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amita Ramanujan hated math. For LJ Comm: numb3rs100, Prompt # 347: Grandparent</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family History

“But paati, I _hate_ math.” Amita kicked her feet under the table in frustration. “I’m never going to be good at it. Can’t I go play outside?”

Her grandmother looked up from her knitting, and Amita knew the lecture that was coming. She heard it all the time, at least three or four times a week. She never got to go play with her friends; there was always homework, and math tutoring, and more homework after that . . . It wasn’t her fault she had Ds in math. It just wasn’t her thing. She was good at art, and English, and social science.

“Amita, you are very lucky to be able to go to school,” her grandmother scolded, fingers still flying with yarn and needles. _I could only go to school until grade three,_ Amita finished silently. _Blah blah blah, be grateful._

“I _know_ that,” she interrupted. “You’ve told me again and again and again. I am going to be a translator, or a lawyer, or an artist. I don’t need to know math!”

Paati stopped, and set down the knitting. “Let me show you something.” She tottered over to the bookshelf and pulled a notebook down from the very top. Amita couldn’t reach that high yet – all of her books were on the bottom shelves. It was an old notebook, worn with yellowed pages. “This was my great-uncle’s,” Paati said solemnly, “Srinivasa Ramanujan.” Amita opened it carefully, and saw pages and pages of numbers. Formulae she’d never seen before, doing things she couldn’t even guess at. “Much of our family’s good fortune is today due to him. One day, before I die, I would like to know what he did, what he discovered, to give us that good fortune.”

Amita shut up and went back to her homework.

**Author's Note:**

> Written circa December 2011. 
> 
> This was largely inspired by my own history in math; I absolutely thought I was awful at it and was destined to become a writer or a lawyer or something. Then I went on and did an undergrad in mathematics. Math is hard; being good at math is really just a matter of working hard.
> 
> If anyone is interested, Srinivasa Ramanujan was a Indian mathematician living in the early 1920s who made important discoveries in mathematical analysis, infinite series, number theory and continued fractions.


End file.
